I touched down in New York City today for a quick stop at Tradeshift’s fall 2018 analyst day. The theme of the event is marketplaces, a topic that brings me back nearly 20 years to the heyday of the B2B marketplace era. But now — unlike when Commerce One, Tradex (which Ariba purchased), Metiom, i2 TradeMatrix and all the industry-based “exchanges” looked much better in PowerPoint than they performed in theory — the technology to support them is real.

Sarika Garg, Tradeshift’s chief strategy officer, kicked things off with a quick introduction framing the marketplace (many-to-many) concept in the context of Uber, and how Uber not just offers transportation but also serves as a market maker — connecting drivers and users, and even financing drivers to buy vehicles to meet supply and demand.

Next up, Tradeshift President and CEO Christian Lanng took the podium, suggesting that “just because things did not work in 1999” does not mean they shouldn’t work now.

Lanng noted that there are two enablers to marketplace success today versus than in the past. The first is the technology platform to support it: It can actually work as promised now and is less expensive to build and enable (by orders of magnitude). The second, he notes, is that sellers are now ready to participate in a marketplace concept.

In positioning Tradeshift as “one integrated platform for supply chain,” Lanng shared the following statistics on the firm’s growth: